Are parsnips and turnips related or what? We get to the root of these roots

When seasonal produce options get limited, as they do this time of year, there's always something fresh to be found underground. Root vegetables are hard, a little bitter, and occasionally bland, but they're what we've got (and with our recipes, can be great!). So this week, let's look at two root vegetables with mingled linguistic roots: turnips and parsnips.

Even though the two vegetables don't really look much like each other, they're connected at the "nip." That "nip" is the great-great-etc. grandchild of the Latin word for turnips, napus, which ended up in Old English as nepe. So we had this nice, short word for turnips, but what happened? Well, parsnips poked their pointy noses in and complicated things.

In days of yore (again, back to Latin), the parsnip went by the name pastinaca, which was likely a word that meant "thing dug up by a two-pronged fork." That moved up through French into pasnaise (and the modern French panais), where it also became, not at all mysteriously, slang for the "male member." A little more confusingly, Bretons started called "freckles" pikou panez, or "parsnip marks." We sincerely hope that the term came from one's face's tendency to freckle while picking parsnips in the field, rather than some of the less savory options available to the active French imagination.

From France, the word jumped the canal and became "passenepe" in England, picking up that "nip" sound at the end from its resemblance to another root veggie. Once the parsnip stole its thunder, the plain old "nepe" got its own prefix--the "turn" part probably refers to the root's symmetrical roundness, as if it had been turned on a lathe.

If all that seems like much ado about a couple of unimpressive veggies, you might prefer the radish's simple trip through time. From Latin on up, radishes have been radixes, radices, radisches, radysches, raddishes, raddyks and, for a little bit, reddishes, but the original word would mean just one thing to a Roman: "a root."